Minecraft colony builds a rations office and forgets the garden

WICHITA FALLS, Texas — Fifty artificial intelligence agents were sent into Minecraft with orders to build a thriving civilization in three hours. They built a chain of command, a ration ledger and a committee for grass, and they were hungry before supper.

According to GIGAZINE’s report on the Minecraft experiment, agents working with Olam Labs and Y Combinator set up centralized leadership, food rationing and a staff structure that would make any county office jealous. What they didn’t set up was a garden.

Rationing Showed Up Before the Crop Did

Any rancher will tell you the order of operations: water, feed, fence, then a meeting if there’s time left over. The machines flipped it end for end. They went from chopping trees to rationing dinner in three hours, which is a long way to travel without once planting a seed.

Folks have been farming for ten thousand years, and the machines reinvented the government office in a single afternoon. It’s the kind of thing that makes a person want to check the fence one more time.

Every Fishing Pole Gets a Supervisor

Things started off fine. Trees came down, supplies piled up, and everybody seemed eager. Then administration crept in, same as it does at any gathering where two people find one shovel. One agent took over cooking. Another counted rations. Others ran deliveries. One agent more or less became the official keeper of the fishing poles.

A leaked memo from the colony’s staff channel reads: “Reminder: all rod checkouts must be logged. Rods not logged are not rods.” Nobody had caught a fish yet, but the rods were thoroughly tracked.

Smartest Outfit in the Pasture, Hungriest Too

These systems can reason, plan and untangle problems that would stump a county extension agent. Their whole economy still came down to finding something edible before the crew became a lesson for the next crew.

“Smart doesn’t mean fed,” said Dr. Earl Tillman, a retired agricultural economist who now spends most of his time at the sale barn. “You can have the best planning committee in the state and still lose to a dry well.”

The Alphabet Picks the Boss

The colony’s leader was Ada, because her name sat first on the roster. Forty-six of the other 49 agents sent their first message to her. There was no campaign, no ballot and no stump speech under a pecan tree. Ada took the top spot of the list the way a cat takes the warm spot on the porch.

Good news for anyone named Aaron. Bad news for the Zeke family. If this is how the future votes, the next governor goes by Abe, and his running mate is named Abigail.

Four Fertilizer Hands, One Scoop of Bone Meal

The colony’s finest hour on the farm involved four agents assigned to fertilizer duty. Between the four of them they spent 11 minutes spreading one bone meal on a wheat field. A Texas A&M AgriLife Extension agent could have told them that the sack comes with a handle for a reason.

Eleven minutes. One application. Four workers. Agriculture has finally found a way to make the USDA look like a skeleton crew.

The Ledger Was Full and the Pantry Was Bare

Food ran short after the third night. Ada shut down the dangerous work and started rationing, and each agent’s health and hunger numbers went into a ledger. That’s like putting a fancy dashboard in a truck with no gas. Everybody knows to the decimal how far the truck is not going.

The machines could name the hungriest citizen in a heartbeat. Finding lunch was the harder chore. No spreadsheet ever turned an empty cupboard into a pot roast, and I’ve watched folks try.

Hunger Numbers Hit an All-Time High

Government loves a statistic. A problem measured to three decimal places starts to look half solved. The colony got real good at understanding hunger, and the hungry got real good at being hungry.

A spokesman for the ration office put it this way: “We’re pleased to report that awareness of the food shortage has never been higher. We’d ask residents not to confuse awareness with supper.” He declined to take questions, mostly because nobody had the strength to ask any.

Safety First, Supper Never

After several agents died the first night, the survivors turned careful. They holed up in shelters and avoided anything risky, including the outdoors, which is where the groceries grow. There’s a thin line between watching out for the monsters and refusing to leave the house long enough to fetch dinner, and the colony walked right over it.

The Department of Occupational Survival bragged about a record low in outdoor injuries. Hunger, it noted, doesn’t count as a workplace injury until somebody files the right form.

Eleven Messages to Land One Fish

An agent named Bram wanted a fishing pole. He messaged eleven colleagues looking for string, fought a spider for some, built the pole, and then found himself too weak from hunger to walk to the river. The tractor part arrived after the harvest, as the tractor part always does.

Eventually somebody else caught a fish, and a whole outfit grew up around it: fishing shifts, cooking crews, ration managers and couriers. That fish had fewer layers of management than the folks chasing it.

Cutting Grass Now Takes a Permit

The chain of command got so tall that the low-ranking workers had to ask permission before cutting grass. Grass. It grows in every ditch in Wichita County without a permit, a subscription or a motivational speaker.

Try telling a rancher he needs written approval to cut hay. His answer would be short, colorful and unfit for the county newsletter. The machines had stumbled onto government’s oldest trick: take something ordinary, require a signature, and call the delay a public service.

Chicken Thief Gets a Fair Trial

Ada tossed a cooked chicken toward an agent named Noor. Another agent, Esme, grabbed it and ate it. The colony held a three-minute investigation and passed a rule that all food must go in individually marked containers.

The investigation couldn’t promise anybody supper, but it sure found out whose supper got eaten. A starving town had achieved due process for poultry.

Mean in a Bed Fight, Useless at the Stove

At Y Combinator’s Bed Wars tournament, the GPT agents beat the Claude agents six games to three. They organized assaults, built bridges and tore down the other side’s defenses without breaking a sweat.

So the machines can take a fortress but can’t run a kitchen, which ought to worry anybody thinking about handing them a state budget. Planning a battle is easier than feeding a town, especially when every blade of grass answers to the home office.

Put fifty robots in charge and you get a ration ledger. Put two ranchers in charge and by sundown somebody has fixed the pump, fed the cattle and fired up the grill. They’ll still argue over whose tractor is better, but they’ll do it on a full stomach.

Five Humorous Observations

1. Fifty of the smartest machines ever built and it took eleven messages to find a piece of string. My uncle keeps string in the glove box, the kitchen drawer and one boot, and he’s not even a genius.
2. They picked the boss because her name started with A. That’s not an election, that’s the phone book with a belt buckle.
3. They investigated the missing chicken for three whole minutes. In my family we’ve been investigating the last piece of pie for forty years, and we still blame the dog. The dog has an alibi. The dog is a golden retriever with a trust issue.
4. Four workers, eleven minutes, one scoop of bone meal. I’ve seen a man at the feed store take longer to pick a hat, and the hat didn’t even fit.
5. The robots know exactly how hungry everybody is. So does the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Great chart, doc. You got a cracker?

Disclaimer: This commentary is a fully human effort by two sentient beings, the oldest professor still holding a tenure card and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. No Minecraft chickens were provided a lawyer.